The Weirdest Game of 2018 Wanted You to Be Nothing at All

Donut County, the story goes, started as a joke: what if there was a game where you played as a hole? Just a mass of emptiness. Nothing at all. In Donut County the hole you play as starts small—it's maybe about the size of one you'd find at a golf course—and as you move it around a stage (a backyard, a traffic jam, a fireworks store), it grows as it swallows up bigger and bigger things, all wryly logged in a growing "trashopedia." It's a lot of fun, but it's also a problem for everyone who actually lives in Donut County—so imagine their frustration when they find out it's all a raccoon's fault.

This is, as you may surmise, a strange video game—one of the most delightfully weird things I've played in 2018. It's also primarily the work of Ben Esposito, an independent game designer known for his work with the weird punk games collective Arcane Kids (responsible for fever dreams like Room of 1000 Snakes, CRAP! No One Loves Me..., and Sonic Dreams Collection). In the games industry, the developers who make video games are rarely public faces the way film directors are, developers like Esposito are hard to come by. So naturally, we had to talk to him about his long, public journey to release one of the most delightfully weird games of 2018.

GQ: What was it like finally releasing Donut County after working on it for five years?Ben Esposito: It was a really interesting turning point for me because I kind of feel like I was stuck as the person that I was in 2013 when I started it and I had to finish this game in order to continue growing and being a person. So I'm like, whoa, I just woke up from a dream, you know?

The game is explicitly called "a Ben Esposito game" in the opening credits. Can you tell me a little bit about the decision to put your name front and center? Games don't do that much!I wanted to see what a game by Ben Esposito would look like. What does it look like when it's 100 percent my aesthetic and it's 100 percent the types of things I'm interested in, and what does my voice really sound like when it's just me? I think it's really cool to see someone's name and be able to point to it like, whoa, games are made by people! I think that can be really inspiring.

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An earlier version of this game used a lot of imagery tied to the Hopi religion, something that you very publicly apologized for after getting criticism. You reworked the game to be what it is today—what was that like?As a small scale developer, you become accountable for the mistakes you make. In my case, that was not something I should have been doing. I felt like it was my responsibility to also be very open about what was going on. Because I felt like I owed it to people, but also I felt like it would be doing a disservice to other developers to not talk about it because there could be other people who were in that position who are facing these decisions. And it would be really great if you saw a talk about it and someone kind of encouraging you to do the right thing. But I felt like it was the right thing to do because if I had seen that [myself] it would have helped me.

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This game reminds me of Twitter, but Twitter from like, five years ago, when a lot of it was people being weird online.I was really into Twitter from like 2012 to 2015. I feel like I had a lot of fun being on Twitter and writing fiction and playing a character. It felt like a really cool community of other people kind of doing the same and experimenting with the format, just trying to make each other laugh. I really, really loved that and that definitely has influenced the writing in the game. In fact it's the only reason why I pursued any serious kind of writing in this game because it wasn't originally going to have any. [I wrote the in-game Trashopedia because] I love really mundane item descriptions for every single thing [in games] where the writers have gotten really tired and now they're just like bored and trying to get through item 900 or whatever. So after writing 300 of them, I totally understand why most of them suck because it's a lot of effort.

Which is funny, because the game has this cheery nihilism to it. It's very "LOL, nothing matters."I definitely view it as a form of positivity, you know? We live inside of structures that we can't always control, like being on Twitter, or having all your information intake dictated by social media. I think it's absurd. And I think there's so much good and there's so much terrible at the same time. So I think the only kind of positive attitude you can adopt is "Well, I'm going to tap into the horrible thing and I'm going to try to get what I can out of it and I'm going to recognize how absurd it is that this is the way I'm living my life." You can then look to your friends who are doing it too and nod at each other and be like, "Yeah, we're really nuts for doing this to ourselves."

There's a lot here that can be read as being about growing up on the Internet and witnessing startup culture and gentrification take over in real time.You know, [it's absurd] the way a startup works at all! It shouldn't really work, because you're spending tons and tons of other people's money to basically give something away for free so that you get everyone hooked on it so that you own the market and disrupt everything else. And now all of a sudden you just own everything and you know, a lot of them don't even end up making money at all. They just keep doing that and keep raising more money. And so I feel that in the absurdity of the startup world, you can draw that throughline to games, where you see free-to-play games taking off that have the same approach. They spend tons of money to acquire tons of users who don't pay, and then they try to monetize the ones that are addicted to it or they just try to own the market and box out all the other games. I feel like maybe I'm in the wrong business,? I don't know. I'm making a game and I'm charging five bucks for it. And I feel like a criminal.

Donut County seems to have a lot in common with your other video game work which seems to largely be about space, and how we explore and relate to it. Is that a conscious thing?Being a character in a video game doesn't really mean anything. They're just your avatar that you're embodying and they have no importance except relative to the space that they're in. And so the space of the video game is the real character. The real character of the game itself is the dimensions and the architecture and how the space is communicating to you, and the ways that you can exploit the space that you're in.

And so Donut County as an extension of that concept is all about a place and all about trying to be consistent in all of that. Trying to tell a story with the objects in their relationship to the characters and objects in relation to the whole scale of the object. And so there is a connection between my previous work doing first-person levels, like in The Unfinished Swan, let's say, or even in What Remains of Edith Finch, where they're all about this story that's built into the world itself. You kind of play as a nobody. So this is the extreme version of that, where you play as nothing, nobody. You play as nothing at all.

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